The Department of Children, Families and Learning collects data on the language spoken at home by all students (K-12) in Minnesota's school districts. The Department aggregates some languages together. As a result, some languages may not appear in the file. Each year, new languages are added to the file. For the 2001-2002 school year, the Department added Oromo, Albanian and Tibetan. Some languages listed in the file may represent a family of languages, and the user should be aware of these aggregations. The language code "Tamil and related languages" includes Bengali, Cutchi, Gujerati, Kannada, Konkani, Lascar, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu. The code "Hindi" includes Hindi, Hindustani and Urdu. "Pilipino" includes Cebuano, Filipino, Ilocano, Ilonko and Tagalog. "Yoruba" may include other African languages not specified in the file.
Students who speak a language other than English at home may also speak English fluently; the user should not assume that a student who speaks a non-English language at home requires instruction in English proficiency.